Flayvr bags $2M to organize your photos by memory

Flayvr scrapbooks so you don't have to

At any given time, I have about 400 pictures on my phone that transfer automatically to DropBox, but damn if they’re not all over the place. Here’s the one of my kid eating pizza on the couch in his underwear while watching Jurassic Park…and there’s the one of my kid trying to eat the dog food with the dogs. My Mac automatically files them by date, so I have that much at least.

But two-year-old Tel Aviv startup Flayvr is taking photo categorization to the automatic scrapbook level with its mobile app, and it’s getting some strong traction. The company announced Wednesday that it has raised $2 million in a round led by Kaedan Capital, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Moshe Lichtman, Aviv Venture Capital and iAngels, with participation from former Microsoft Vice President of Strategy and Partnership Hank Vigil, Fritz Lanman, Adler Chomski and all of Flayvr’s angel round investors including Rafi Gidron, Zohar Gilon, Yariv Gilat, and Partam Hightech.

Founded in 2012, the company uses social, behavioral, user-generated, geolocation, computer-vision and time-based signals to automatically organize your photos. So, for example, if you have your friend’s baby shower in your calendar and then you take a bunch of pictures during that time frame, Flayvr automatically links them together under one event.

To date, the app has drawn some two million users and has processed over one billion photos and videos. The company says it’s on a clear path toward generating revenue, but it’s not making its business model public yet.

Google named Flayvr a Top Developer in 2014 and featured the Android Flayvr app as one of the Best Apps of 2013. And data from Onavo Insights reveals that Flayvr has one of the highest engagement rates of any photo app.

“Personal memories continue to be scattered across multiple locations resulting in a huge management, backup and search challenge. Consumers’ use of multiple devices has made this problem even worse,” said Moshe Lichtman, in a statement. “The Flayvr team has taken upon itself to solve this difficult problem once and for all with an elegant solution that embraces the multi-device reality on one hand and takes full advantage of cloud-based storage on the other. The Flayvr solution dramatically improves the entire photo and video capture and management experiences with a mix of smart automation and ease of use.”

With this round, Lichtman will join the Flayvr board.

The company plans to use the new capital to double the Flayvr team and expand operations in the United States.

“Flayvr technology can do for photos and videos what Waze did for maps and WhatsApp did for messaging. That's the true goal and our first priority,” CEO and co-founder Ron Levy told me.